Big weekends mean big coverage for student journalists

Casey Compernolle, Column

 While many outsiders see Ohio University as a place to party, journalists see it as a place to report.  Big weekends such as Halloween, Homecoming, and spring Fests give the school  a crazy, sometimes unorthodox reputation.

However, huge block parties, such as Halloween, gain national recognition and provide journalistic opportunities almost exclusive to OU journalists.  Having the chance to cover  such large stories can be tricky though and must be done with careful consideration.

It’s no secret that OU was recently named the “#1 Party School,” by the Princeton Review.  And with such a title, comes both positive and negative reactions.

“I have mixed feelings about the title,” Sean McCafferty, a junior majoring in education, said.  “Sometimes I feel as though the students here aren’t portrayed accurately.  I want to be a teacher, and the party school reputation can sometimes take away from that professionalism; especially when trying to find a job.”

With such a strong journalism community here at Ohio University, journalists are sometimes faced with a double-edged sword. How do we act as good journalists and simply provide the facts without making our school seem like a mere party school?

Wesley Lowery, a senior majoring in news writing and editing and editor-in-chief of the student-run newspaper The Post, is familiar with this dilemma all too well.

“What is difficult is people see students as the problem, but they blame the media rather than the students for the behavior.  It’s hard when you have to write about students’ arrests.  I mean, how do you merit someone’s name?  Is it right or wrong?   Its very unique because these events don’t happen everywhere, OU does get national attention in the fall and spring and it gives journalists breakthrough stories that provide great experience in the field, but it’s not always easy.”

As McCafferty pointed out, professionalism matters.  Full media access coverage on these weekends can sometimes glamorize the party aspect,.

Nevertheless, coverage must be provided, and student journalists must work within the context they have.

“The difference between us and nationally known reporters is that we have context, we have experience, and when a major news outlet picks up a story that is when it usually gets blown out of proportion,” Lowery said.

While this proposes challenges for student journalists covering major student associated events, we can use this unique situation to our advantage to gain valuable reporting experience.

Giovanna Delgarbino, a sophomore studying pubic relations agrees.

“Instead of living within the shadow of a party school atmosphere, it’s the perfect opportunity to rise above it.  When I go for a job interview my portfolio won’t show my drinking skills, it will show my writing skills.  OU has provided me with the chance to write about concerts, musicals, speakers, and so much more.  I think that is what I want to really shine through in my work.  Many journalists aren’t even partaking in the festivities, we’re just bystanders documenting it,” she said.

It’s easy for people to get caught up in the party school hype, but it’s also easy to see that student journalists truly care about the information they are putting out.  Students want accuracy, and who better to report it then the students themselves?

“Large weekends are always exciting, but they are exhausting.  The Post had full time coverage for the entire weekend; it was a group effort.  Each reporter had shifts, and for every shift there was reporters every hour,” Lowery said.

Big weekends at OU can be tricky for student journalists , but when students work hard to accurately report these events we’re showing readers that we care about journalism.

 

Achieving a Balance for Effective Reporting

Holly Moody, Column

We laugh, we cry, we make jokes and may even get a little angry at times. The news has the almighty power of  evoking emotions from even the toughest of human beings in our society. However, unlike those reading or      watching at home, journalists have the tough task of removing themselves from heart-wrenching situations in  order to deliver an unbiased and accurate story to the public.

This may sound simple, but for some journalists it is not.

After interviewing CBS correspondent Byron Pitts a couple weeks ago and hearing about his experiences  reporting, I was left to ponder about reporting tragic events and began asking myself questions such as; what type of journalist do I want to be?  One that feels a connection to each story and each person who is affected? Or one whose mission is just to get the story out as quickly as possible? And, how can a journalist be so unattached when witnessing such horrific events? Is there a time and a place to be emotional?

While I still ask myself these questions, I think I’ve come to a common place on this touchy subject matter.

First, it’s important to remember that journalists are human. We, by no means, have hearts made of stone. But the key thing for every journalist to remember is that there must be a balance between professionalism and being sensitive to the subject at hand within each and every interview.

By this I mean that a journalist should not feel as though they have to build up a shield of armor to combat the emotions that they may face when covering traumatic events or heart breaking situations. It’s the compassion towards the story that drives a journalist to create something that has the power to make a difference and impact thousands of viewers. However, there must be a clear line to separate a journalist’s emotions from the reality of the story.

To help define this line, you want to be fair at all times and ensure that you are delivering all sides of an issue. A journalist writing on an emotional rampage can easily turn into bias reporting, which, in turn, can lead into a whole world of trouble and jeopardize their career. Achieving this balance may be hard, but it’s part of building yourself into a good journalist.

There have been many times where I’ve watched the evening news and, after becoming disgusted due to a story of someone else’s misfortunes, felt a sudden urge to rant on Twitter or vent my frustrations on my blog. But, it is in these moments that I have to remember that my job as a journalist is, at all times, to spread the news, not my rage and anger.

In some ways, I think it’s good to connect with a story because it makes it easier to sift through piles of information and decide what the audience really needs to see or what they too can potentially connect with. However, this connection can’t override the facts.

It can be tricky to walk this fine line between good, effective publicity and biased reporting. I wish I could give a precise measurement as to how much a journalist should be personally affected and detached from the situation. However, I believe this balance will come naturally with the more reporting experience gained.

Having this balance makes for an effective story. The most important thing to remember is that the audience always comes first. A journalist’s mission is to give the audience the truth, but also something that engages their interests whether it be good, bad, happy or sad.

It’s one of those nights again. The female voice over the loudspeaker at Alden has already demanded that we relocate our weary study group to the second floor. I’m not sure exactly how long we’ve been here, but we’re on coffee number three and bathroom break number five.

As my fellow study buddies continue their schoolwork and try not to fall victim to Facebook’s temptations, I continue to stare at my blank Microsoft Word document. The blinking line is mocking me. I have only a couple hours remaining to write an article, and I’m having a hard time searching for the right words because they can’t just be any words. They have to be the words. The words that entice our audiences. The words that inform our public. The words that bring people the truth.

Sounds like plenty of pressure to put on just rearranging 26 letters repeatedly, right? Why do you think we like coffee so much? As journalists, we strive to deliver cutting-edge stories and to always be on top of our game and deadlines. However, that’s becoming increasingly more difficult to accomplish as the journalism world grows more and more competitive. Because Scripps is one of top journalism schools in the country, it can be overwhelming and intimidating when surrounded by some of the brightest students to step foot into the field. So how do we journalism students relieve the pressure and set ourselves apart from the competition?

That’s exactly what I’ve been asking myself for several weeks. I’m currently in the “I have no idea where I’m going” phase, and I need to do x, y and z to get a career. I stress about landing internships, building connections, joining the correct organizations and achieving the best grades. Although graduation is still years away, these thoughts cross my mind– as well as everyone else’s, I’m sure — constantly. It’s hard to imagine getting real jobs and difficult to think about the time when we have more expenses to cover than just cell phone bills and bar tabs.

It doesn’t help that we’re being constantly reminded that our current economy is in a worse condition that it has been in years. It feels like I’m being bombarded with unemployment statistics everywhere I turn. With the unemployment rate so high, it’s even more crucial that I stand out and beat the next guy.

So with all these demands placed on our young adult lives, how do we students survive our college years and those after?  The best advice I was ever given was simply one word: breathe.

I’m hereby promising myself that although it seems like preparing the journalism world is too intense, there’s absolutely nothing we can’t handle.

Why? Because we’re Scripps warriors and we were bred for success. It’s time to turn a new leaf and leave the stress behind. I have three simple strategies to this game plan.

Firstly, it’s important to remain positive, focused and open-minded. I’m going to embrace more new challenges than Danny Tanner embraces people in an entire season of Full House.

For instance, if anyone has ever taken Professor Tatge’s Information Gathering class, then you know it’s challenging. After receiving grades for our first assignment, I think the entire classroom’s jaw collectively dropped. However, this is one of the most interesting classes as well as professor that I have yet to take. As Holly Colleta, a sophomore in the magazine sequence, said, “If you survive, you’ll come out a better person.” That’s the goal, isn’t it? So welcome, challenge!

Secondly, I pledge to be a knowledge-absorbing, experience-sucking sponge. I have so many brilliant professors and peers surrounding me that it’s impossible not to learn from them. I admire my fellow Scripps warriors mostly for their burning curiosity and desire to learn.

Finally, and most importantly, I’ll remember to breathe not only for my physical well-being (obviously), but for my sanity. After all, I take certain measures to prepare for the future, but nothing is ever certain. As the cheesy, elementary school statement reminds us, all we can do is try our best. We’re Scripps warriors and will do anything to achieve our dreams, even if that means chuckling at sleep and gazing at blank, white documents for a while.

From ‘twisted lens’ to Scripps: One writer’s journey

Column • Brady Edge

This past summer, I fell in love. I spent hours in my room and on my back porch — once up against my favorite tree in the yard — forgetting to eat, forgetting everything else around me, blinded by passion. With no schoolwork and my whole life in front of me, I finally realized how much I loved to write.

In the library of my laptop, in a folder marked “Joy,” I’ve piled on miles and miles of stories that have never seen the light of day. One is called “Pickles,” about a boy, a mom and a train station. Another is a short attempt at nonsense — four stories that play together in a world where puns make reality and homonyms can be a matter of life and death.

My favorite is a story about myself, written through a twisted lens. This was the first story that I could write past the first 30, unclear pages of development. I was thinking of new plot lines and characters daily, always excited to continue the truthful-yet-fictional story of Nell (me, more or less) and Jed (my image of adulthood).

I would love to describe the plot, but it was cut off suddenly by the reality of college life; I’m completely busy, and my mind has lost the train of Nell’s thought. I don’t know what the story is called, but it’s about me, at every misconception and fear along the path to adulthood. It’s about a boy who struggled and worried about growing up, only to realize (surprise) that he’d already missed childhood.

But how did I get here?

In elementary school, I had problems with concentration. My parents claimed this was because of overactive “brilliance,” which made me zone out and freeze up in the middle of class while others were heading to the carpet squares for story time. Only a genius would act in such a way, obviously.

As a result, I was put on “the pill.” “The pill” was a sequence of different ADD medications — Adderall, Concerta, etc. This did the trick as far as grades went, but with the medication came   inconvenient side effects — appetite-loss, nausea, and the loss of personality. It was like somebody simply walked into my brain and stole my sense of humor. My parents noticed, and I was taken off the drugs.

But I owe some thanks to the medication for initiating my love of writing. Once I was off my

ADD medication, I had to find ways to focus my “brilliant” energy — ways other than staring blankly at a classroom wall and drooling on my workbooks, as productive as that is.

So, I dove into guitar and practiced a lot. I also began to write. I started journals and wrote stories about anything I could put in my head — stories about my oboe-reeds going on killing sprees, crazy shih tzu dogs framing my Jack Russells by pooping on the carpet, a magical walking stick that helps me overthrow an evil boot camp, even one about my Furby Baby coming alive after I pulled out his batteries (Yes, I had a Furby Baby, and I’m not ashamed).

My favorite story though, was titled “The End.” It was a story about a crazy boy named Gary who wakes up to find Earth has simply stopped spinning. I was always afraid of death in these days. Because of this fear, I was obsessed with my own mortality and with making my mark on the world. “The End” would be an apocalyptic book to rival the success of Harry Potter — hell, the Bible, even — and it would be my personal monument and shrine. I have that extremely short epic in my desk to remind me of how my dreaming started.

Then I stopped writing.

I continued to scribble madly in journals for a while during my middle-school years. It wasn’t so much passion as it was obsession that kept me writing. I couldn’t stand the idea of not having my life put into pages, not having every dark emotion that exists in the pre-adolescent’s mind nailed to words and displayed for my future-self to know and fear. Of course, the things a middle-schooler fears and hates become smaller and smaller as time goes on, so these journals are more amusing than frightening now. But, it gets the point across to me: Whatever I’m afraid of in the present moment, and whatever I think is impossible, will look like nonsense by this time next year.

I no longer write for fame or fear. I write to make sense of things, and sometimes, just to escape from a world I can’t understand. Mostly though, I write because it makes me a kid again. Though my grammar is better, the feeling is still the same: I can make a world out of words, and I have complete control.

I never thought it would be like this. Getting into Scripps has been a rude wake-up call. I’ve never felt so busy. I’ve never felt so close to my phone, which now keeps calendar appointments, class times, alarms and everything else but the food I need to keep me moving at every waking moment. I don’t yet have time to visit characters and make Furbies come to life, but I have my own plot unfolding right in front of me, a little too quickly for comfort. I don’t know where I want to go from here. I don’t know if I’ll be into PR, advertising, environmental journalism, or if I’ll just make my living as a garage-sale retailer. What I do believe is that I love to write, and this is the place to start.

Going online– What’s in the books for print journalism?

Column • Holly Storrow
I have the same general routine every morning. I get out of bed, grumble at my alarm clock, grab a granola bar and sit down at my computer to check out the latest headlines on Yahoo! News.

I never used to read about current news. I hated reading through a newspaper that seemed to hold too many stories and words on a single page, but now online news sources have become a staple of my life. I no longer check print publications for news stories or information, but instead pull up an Internet browser on my Mac and head straight for CNN or Fox News. It is fast, simple and convenient — just the way a college student’s life needs to be.

But when I start praising the Digital Age for all of the ways it has made my life easier, I begin to wonder what made me start to dislike print versions of news sources in the first place. Maybe it was the roughfeel of the paper on my hands. Or maybe the ink smears that came away on my fingertips after I finished reading through the morning newspaper. Or maybe I have just grown to love modern technology more than the years of publication history held in a printed news source.

I don’t know the answer to my above thoughts, and I probably never will. But what I do know is that the Digital Age has forever changed me when it comes to getting my daily dose of world affairs. I crave news stories right away, and I hate waiting for a newspaper to be delivered. I love the idea of the iPad and all of the features and capabilities that it holds when it comes to reading news sources online (and yes, I will readily admit that my hearts flutters every time I see one). And I love magazines like Ohio University’s very own fashion publication, Thread Magazine, that use an online program to create the magazine, complete with flip-able pages. It has all the features of a magazine without wasting resources that will more than likely be thrown away when I finishing reading the various articles.

While I never want to see printed publications die out (for that would be like an integral part of journalism history falling off the map), I am incredibly happy that online journalism has become so popular in today’s society. Without it, I would still be avoiding news sources and lacking knowledge of the world’s affairs. And what kind of journalist would that make me?

Column • Matt Rancourt

I’m usually not very good at following trends.

When everyone else started listening to music on iPods, I was the guy still lugging around a CD player. I owned a cell phone for two years before sending my first text message. And I only just recently found out that all of thepeople talking about Jersey Shore are not actually referring to a location in New Jersey.

So, yeah, “trendy” is not really a word you would use to describe me. Unless the subject is online journalism, that is.

That’s the one trend that I have managed to keep up with, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s because journalism is going digital. But, hey, don’t take my word for it. Just ask Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, who recently admitted at a conference in London that his newspaper will be forced to stop printing “sometime in the future.” And I don’t think it would be going too far out on a limb to say that the future Sulzberger spoke of will arrive within the next five to 10 years.

So, if the publisher of the New York Times is ready to “throw in the towel” and admit that his paper will not exist (in printed form) in the future, then how bleak must the outlook be for all other, smaller newspapers out there?

There was a time when I would lay awake at night struggling with the answer to that very question, along with all of the other questions that came along with it.

I’d think to myself, what am I supposed to do with a degree in news writing when newspapers may not even survive into the next decade?  Am I going to blow four or five years of tuition money and end up with absolutely nothing to show for it?  What’s the point of going to college to learn how to work in a profession that soon won’t even exist?

Of course, I now realize that I was looking at things the wrong way.

The truth is that a journalism degree is never going to be useless, and certainly not one from a school as reputable as Scripps.  There are always going to be people who list “journalist” as their occupation when they file their taxes.  The industry is not dying; it’s merely changing– adapting to all of the technology we now have available to us.

The Internet is quickly becoming America’s preferred news provider.

I don’t know why this should have ever been surprising to me. After all, I have been reading online news for years now.

See, I’m a big sports nut. And since I’m not actually good enough to play them, reading about sports is how I like to spend my free time. However, the newspaper that I once subscribed to (like 99% of the newspapers in circulation) had only one sports section. I found this to be insufficient.

So, I turned to the World Wide Web – and I have yet to be disappointed.

For starters, it seems like almost every sports network has a website, be it ESPN or Fox Sports or even a smaller local network. And these websites often have content that does not appear in print or on television, usually because the writers only ply their craft online. ESPN, in particular, makes a lot of money by charging people for access to online-exclusive stories and analysis. Personally, I’ve found the work to be worth the price of admission.

In addition, most newspapers and magazines also have web pages. And while it’s nice to have access to articles before they are even published in print, my favorite part is usually reading the blogs written by some of my favorite sports writers. A writer will often make a candid observation or comment in a blog that won’t find its way into a news story, which makes the reading more interesting.

The point that I’m trying to make is that online news content is often the most insightful, informative, and thorough coverage one could ever hope to find.  Usually it comes from paid writers or reporters, but occasionally you’ll get a really well-informed blogger who proves to be a fun read as well.  If you know what you’re looking for, you can find some great reporting online.

And the best part, of course, is being able to access all of this information from your own personal laptop computer.

These are the reasons why journalism is shifting online– greater affordability, instant availability, quality reporting, opportunity for readers to provide direct feedback through comments, and the list goes on.  Needless to say, the positives look to far outweigh the negatives.

None of this is to say that print journalism is going to completely disappear from the face of the earth, but the field of online media is only going to keep expanding and people are going to keep flocking to the Internet for news coverage.

Out with the old and in with the new, as they say.

Not that I’m worried anymore.  News articles and columns aren’t just going to start magically appearing online, so I know that my degree will still serve me well.  I’ll just likely be working with a different medium than I originally anticipated.

I’ll adjust.  After all, I am pretty good at following trends.

Now, where did I put that CD player?